“He’ll get an exhibition,” urged the Headmaster.

The father was not impressed.

“Moderation in all things,” he said, shaking a shrewd head.  “Edication as well.  He’s stood out long enough.  Time he began to ’arn.”

The Headmaster’s arguments were of no avail.

“I’d got all the schooling I needed by then I was eleven.  He’s had till he’s eighteen.  If it’s to be of any good to him it’ll be good now,” said Mr. Silver.

To his surprise and secret pleasure his son backed him.  He didn’t want to go to a University.

“It’s not much use unless you’re a classic,” the boy said.  “And I’m a mathematician.”

Besides he had his own clear-cut views of what he wished to do.  And those views were very strange.  He wanted to go into a Bank.

“Bank!” cried the amazed father.  “Set at a counter all day and calcalate sums?”

The boy grinned behind his spectacles in his foolish way.

“That’s about it,” he said.

“Well, I never!” cried the father.

But true to his principles he let his son go his own way.  Indeed, he helped him to a clerkship in the great Midland and Birmingham Joint Stock Bank, of which his landlord, Sir Evelyn Merry, was chairman.

“Glad to get him,” said the old baronet.  “If he’s half as good a man as his father he’ll do well.”

The boy started at a local branch, and in a year was transferred to the central office at Birmingham.

There he spent his spare time attending evening classes.  At the end of a year he held a certificate, was entitled to put certain letters after his name, and had written an article on bullion which appeared in the Banker’s Magazine and was translated into German.

By the time he was thirty he was a manager, and ten years later he was one of the managing directors of the second biggest Joint Stock Bank in the richest country in the world.

And he did not stop there.  George Silver was a financier in the great style, and a superlatively honest one.  He had the initiative, the knowledge, and above all the judgment that made some men call him the Napoleon of Threadneedle Street.  At forty-five he launched the Union Bank of Brazil and Uruguay; and to that colossal undertaking he devoted the last twenty-five years of his strenuous and successful life.

In the City he was known thereafter as Brazil Silver.

The Bank was his passion and his life.

When at fifty, to the astonishment of many, he married, the City merely said: 

“He must have an heir to carry on the Bank.”

Mrs. Silver was a semi-aristocratic woman of limited intelligence, suppressed ambition, and sound limbs.  It was the latter characteristic which won her a husband.  He was not such a bad judge of make and shape as his father would have had the world believe; and as usual Brazil Silver’s judgment proved good.  In the appointed time his wife fulfilled her function, and gave him the son he asked of her.